


Love Makes Nonsense of Space (and Time Will Disappear)

by Annabelle_Priscilla_McQuillan



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Space Stone, Super Soldier Peggy Carter, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22072342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annabelle_Priscilla_McQuillan/pseuds/Annabelle_Priscilla_McQuillan
Summary: ASteggy Secret Santa giftforpeggycarter46, heavily inspired bythis song.*“Howard Stark,” Peggy says low, dangerous, “what is in that vial?”“It’s Steve Rogers’ blood.”Peggy’s got her hand balled into a fist before she’s even aware of it, but before it can make contact with Howard’s face, her mind has caught up with her.“You’d better have Erskine’s notes to go along with it.”
Relationships: Edwin Jarvis & Howard Stark, Peggy Carter & Edwin Jarvis, Peggy Carter & Howard Stark, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Winifred Barnes & Peggy Carter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 54





	Love Makes Nonsense of Space (and Time Will Disappear)

**Author's Note:**

> **TW for mentions of infant death**
> 
> This reads more like a string of ideas than a proper story, but I hope you all enjoy it anyway ^.^

### i. reason is on our side

“Hey Peg, you wanna see something nifty?”

“That’s a dangerous sentence, coming from you,” Peggy says, lifting an eyebrow. 

“Not dangerous. At least not in the way you’re thinking.” Howard winks, and Peggy’s eyebrow lifts a little higher. “It’s about that little glowy blue thing your fella and the rest of the guys _appropriated_ from Schmidt.”

“Oh?”

Howard beckons, and Peggy, with mild trepidation, pads after him down to the weapons bunker. She hangs back, arms crossed, as Howard sets up one of the more unbelievable-looking guns and a piece of scrap metal. 

“Watch.”

A ray of blue light, a string of smoke, and the scrap piece disappears. 

“Yes, I’m already well aware that guns destroy things, Howard.”

“That’s just it though, Peg; they don’t. Look at this.” Peggy is just intrigued enough to let Howard grab her arm and bodily steer her towards the spot that the scrap metal had been. “What are you _not_ seeing?”

Peggy purses her lips and takes a moment to answer. “Evidence.”

“Right. Not even ashes. Which means I’m thinking that these weapons don’t obliterate their targets.”

“And instead they...what, transport them elsewhere?”

Howard shrugs, but his hands are up and his grin is huge.

“So where do they end up?” 

“That’s what I’m tryin’ to find out.”

“Do you think you can _set_ the destination?”

“Again, what I’m trying to find out.”

“Well, if you need a test subject...” Peggy’s grin, on the other hand, is small, “they do say if you want something done right...”

“Oh, go to Hell, Peg.”

Peggy flips her hair at him on her way out.

*

### ii. i hear your voice; it’s whispering

“Peggy?”

Peggy jerks her head up. The radio’s been crackling for about a half hour now. Everyone’s left her alone while they make the last sweeps of the base, so she hasn’t had the excuse of other people’s judgment.

Luckily.

“Steve?” She wipes away a tear, until now stayed on her upper lip, before it can slip into her mouth. “Steve? Your coordinates?”

“Don’t waste—” the signal crackles, “—resources.”

“Don’t worry about that, Steve. We’ll come get you, if...”

“Peg—”

“That serum should keep you going for awhile,” Peggy snaps. “It has to, doesn’t it? Long enough for us to mount a rescue mission. You‘ll be fine.”

“It’s real cold right now, Peggy.”

“You’ve been cold before. Remember? You told me all about it, how your apartment, growing up...”

“Liv—” the radio signal flickers again, but she catches the laugh in his voice despite how weak it is, “in squalor.”

“You‘ve got to show me it,” she says, edging her seat closer to the desk. “Steve? I want to see it; where you lived. You‘ve got to show me. Promise.”

If he tries to respond, it’s drowned out in the radio crackle. 

“Saturday night,” she presses, her face an inch away from the radio. “After the club closes. Does that sound like a plan? We’ll take the train and you can walk me by there. Show me your old...your old haunts.”

“Steve?” she says, when a long moment passes in silence. “Steve? You’re still there?”

“It’s real cold out here, Peg.”

*

### iii. i am you, and you are mine

“...Peggy?”

“One and only.”

“Oh. Yes. Well. Do come in, dear.”

The Barnes’ sitting room is inappropriately well-lit, considering the dark clothes Winifred wears, and the seemingly even darker circles under her eyes. 

“Thank you, for having me over.”

“Oh of course, dear. I’ve wanted to meet you in person for awhile now. Steve told us so much about you in his letters...”

“Likewise. Well...in person.”

The way the light inside is cast, though, does not illuminate the two gold stars placed in their window. Maybe it ought to, because the contrast with the sunlight streaming in makes the two dark shapes infinitely more noticeable. 

“Oh dear God, Peggy. What on earth happened to your hands?”

Peggy glances down at her palms even as she folds them loosely together. 

_“Take me to Steve Rogers,”_ she’d whispered, arms outstretched, closing in on the Tesseract that Howard had dredged up from the seafloor. She didn’t think getting shot with one of the weapons would afford her any control over her destination. 

“Just a war wound, nothing more.”

 _“Even if that worked, Steve won’t be alive by now,”_ Howard had said, pressing Peggy’s palms around a balled-up rag to cover both wounds at once. _“Peg, c’mon, don’t make me lose another friend, please.”_

“They’re not the first I lost,” Winifred says, after she steps back into the living room with tea and sees Peggy staring at the window. “Not that it gets any easier the more it happens.”

Peggy is silent, but gives the smallest of wry smiles, welcoming the woman to continue talking if she wants. 

“There were twins,” Winifred says, setting one cup-laden saucer in Peggy’s outstretched hands. “They were babies. We almost lost Steve at the same time, too; he caught what they had. We _told_ him not to come around while they were sick, but...”

“He had to help you out.” Winifred makes a soft, high noise. “He was always reliable for that sort of foolhardy thing, wasn’t he.”

Winifred pinches her lips together in a thin line, tilts her head back to retract the tears, and nods. When she brings her head back down it’s to stare into her cup. 

“You know, I told his mother I’d look after him. As if he were my own.” Peggy sees Winifred’s tea ripple as another drop of water falls into it. “A stellar job I did for the pair of them.”

“Mrs. Barnes, no.” Peggy balances her cup and saucer in one hand, bending it awkwardly, so she can hold onto the older lady’s wrist. “It wasn’t...they made their choices, and they were proud of them.”

“And I’m proud of them, too, but they’re _gone_ ,” Winifred chokes, rocking on her hips, eyes still screwed shut. “My boys are _gone_ , I don’t even have their bodies to...”

Peggy narrowly avoids spilling her tea as she bends down to set her cup on the floor. She hasn’t got her arms around Winifred’s shoulders when the older woman latches onto her arm, face tucked hard into Peggy’s axilla, tears soaking her blouse. 

Peggy doesn’t mind, the same way Winifred doesn’t mind the saltwater dripping into her hair.

*

### iv. i’ve had enough (i’m not giving up)

“Howard Stark,” Peggy says low, dangerous, “what is in that vial?”

“It’s Steve Rogers’ blood.”

Peggy’s got her hand balled into a fist before she’s even aware of it, but before it can make contact with Howard’s face, her mind has caught up with her. 

“You’d better have Erskine’s notes to go along with it.”

*

### v. of science and the human heart there is no limit

“How ya feelin’?”

“A tad dizzy. I...one moment.” Peggy wobbles on her feet, and catches herself on the side of the chamber. She bats Howard away when he takes her elbow, choosing instead to stumble into a chair of her own accord. “I see why Steve was...how he was.”

“Can you tell me what you think you’re gonna find, Peg?” Howard asks, after Jarvis gives him a glass of water to give to her. 

“Steve.”

“It’s been over a year, y’know.”

“I’m aware. Would you like to continue stating the obvious, or are you going to give me _some_ credit?”

“All I’m sayin’—all I’m—I don’t know what I’m fuckin’ saying.”

“I believe Mr. Stark is simply...worried about how you will react to what you find,” Jarvis fills in delicately. 

“Yeah. I don’t want you to...just because that lady—“

“ _That lady_ loves Steve,” Peggy snaps. “You didn’t see her. I was the only thing holding her up, for Christ’s sakes. He was like another son to her and w-...she deserves to have something to say good-bye to.”

“I’m going to find Barnes’s body, too,” she says, after a long silence, within which none of them can meet each other’s eyes. 

“All right. Yeah. Sure. _If_ this cockamamie scheme of yours even works.”

“Why Howard. I thought you thrived on a steady diet of cockamamie.”

“That would be cock _iness_ ,” Jarvis puts in.

“My mistake.”

*

### vi. love and logic keep us clear

Peggy sets the paper down, not entirely satisfied but willing to let it be the last thing her parents hear from her. She sets it atop the one she wrote for the Barneses, closes the folder containing them both, and hands it to Howard. 

He had offered, in his sideways way, to be the one to try this; just before enhancing Peggy with the serum. But he would be the one most likely able to figure out what went wrong, if something did; how to tweak the experiment until they got something viable. _”Other people require your swelled head. I’m certainly not the only one who could use something like this.”_

It kinda pisses Howard off that she was being sincere when she said that, because he knows it’s actually spurning her on to find Steve even more. The pair of them had that _I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more_ attitude in common. 

Peggy tosses of a mock-salute to Howard once she’s finished donning her Arctic gear, before turning on her heel and striding towards the Tesseract. From a few feet away she can feel the heat emanating off of it, but it’s not nearly as blistering as when she tried this before. When she wraps her hands around the cube, she can tell it’d take at least a half a minute before it scorched her palms again. 

Peggy glances down at her shoes, and has to resist the urge to click her heels together. But she does close her eyes, and she thinks of home. 

“Take me to Steve Rogers.”

*

### vii. in science and in medicine, i was a stranger (you took me in)

Howard thinks he’s used to having reality warp around him. People getting stuck with needles and hit with light, and coming out the other side looking like Greek gods; okay. Weapons shooting lasers that disappear their targets completely; swell. The Tesseract vanishing along with Peggy; theorized, and all part of a day’s work regardless. 

Peggy’s voice coming over the radio about a half hour later, saying “Dear God...Howard, he’s still alive. Howard, I think he’s still alive.”

Now that...that takes him a moment.

*

### viii. freedom has a scent

Steve blinks his eyes open to the sound of birdsong, a staticky radio playing a baseball game, and someone breathing in his ear. The window is open, letting in sunlight and fresh air, blowing what smells like Peggy’s day-faded perfume across his face. He closes his eyes again, to breathe it in deeply, without distraction, but cracks an eye open again at the feel of the hand on his stomach, rising with his inhalation. 

“There are other ways to wake me up, y’know.”

Peggy curls in on herself, smushing her face into Steve’s shoulder and taking the opportunity to kiss it. 

“How’s that saying go? If it ain’t broke...”

Peggy’s American accent, though flawless, never fails to get a laugh out of him, which she muzzles with the same hand that she had rested on his stomach last night. 

“I could always let you wake up alone.”

“Absolutely not,” Steve mumbles from behind her hand. 

In a few hours their apartment will be filled with people they’d thought, at one point or another, they’d never see again and vice-versa; they’ll file in for a party to celebrate how wrong they all were. They ought to get up and start preparing for it. 

Steve almost licks her palm, to startle her into freeing his mouth, but he can feel the faint remainders of the Tesseract scars, ones that her serum didn’t fully fix up, pressing against his lips. 

He kisses her palm instead, and turns over, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her to his chest, thanking God that this time he’s landed somewhere just as unrelenting as himself and the polar ice, but infinitely more warm.


End file.
